SenseDefend

Synthetic-media instruments, by article and effective date

Compliance questions the published text can settle

A question is answered here when official wording and published product documentation between them settle it. How a regulator will apply a clause is not that kind of question and is marked as such. As of 2026-09-12.

Where the record stops and legal advice would beginWhat a paragraph says, who it binds and when it applies are questions the official text settles. Whether a particular marking arrangement is adequate, and how an authority would treat it, are questions that need facts and a qualified opinion.What would settle itThe textRecordedWording, role and date ofapplication, quoted from theofficial source.A regulatorNamed, not answeredHow a clause is applied inpractice is not published inadvance.Your factsNamed, not answeredAdequacy depends on anarrangement a record cannotsee.Two branches are left open deliberately
Fig. 1 Filling the right-hand branch would mean inventing a standard and attributing it to an instrument that does not contain one.

The distinction is not caution for its own sake. A clause can be perfectly clear about what must be marked and entirely silent about what counts as adequate marking, and a register that filled that silence would be inventing the standard it claims to record.

What can be answered covers most of what a production actually asks: which paragraph applies to a role, what the text requires in terms, which generators document the marking a paragraph assumes, and from when.

Answers quote both sides and link to both. A reader who disagrees can go to the official text and to the vendor page without passing through this record's summary of either.

1The questions

  • Two kinds of mark — Why a watermark a viewer sees and a signal inside the file answer different paragraphs of Article 50, and which entries here describe each.
  • Marks that come off — Every visible mark recorded here can be removed.
  • What the free tier does — What each vendor's free tier publishes about watermarking, why those rows rest on omissions, and what that means for trial footage.
  • The carve-outs — The three carve-outs written into Article 50, the condition attached to each, and why only one of them switches a duty off entirely.
  • When it starts — Article 50 starts to apply on 2 August 2026, a date set elsewhere in the regulation, and its text is flagged as amended.
  • What nobody publishes — Interoperability, accessibility and timing are asked for by Article 50 and addressed by no generator's public pages recorded here.
  • The other duties — The article that requires generated media to be marked also carries disclosure duties on interaction, deep fakes, emotion recognition and published text.
  • Who is bound — Article 50 does not put one duty on everyone: paragraph 1 addresses providers, paragraphs 3 and 4 address deployers.
  • Still to be written — One paragraph points at codes of practice on detection and marking, so the detail a reader wants is delegated rather than written into the article.
  • Inside the file — Seven of the sixteen entries describe a signal or a manifest that travels with the output.
  • Numbers without names — A membership figure, a version number and two prices.
  • Where it is written — Marking statements here sit on pricing pages, system cards, API references, support articles and one compliance guide.
  • Nothing unless asked — Two hosted interfaces document an optional marking flag that defaults to off, which puts the whole question into somebody's integration code.
  • Who can check it — Reading routes in this record run from a public site anybody can open to tools a vendor describes as internal, with nothing in between.
  • The audio half — The paragraph names synthetic audio alongside image and video.
  • Open weights — One entry in this record publishes its model weights.
  • What an omission proves — Several cells in this record are filled because a phrase on the paid plans is absent from the free one.
  • Two layers at once — Two entries apply a manifest and something else to the same output.
  • Does anyone say why — One entry gives a reason for removing a mark and one names the mark's purpose in a single adjective.
  • A flag set in code — One support page records a mark applied in test mode that cannot be removed from an existing video.
  • Scope you can use — A claim bounded by a named feature can sort a folder of files.
  • What an upload leaves — Platforms rebuild containers as a matter of course.
  • Naming a standard — Four entries name a published provenance specification.
  • What buying changes — A purchase removes something a viewer can see.

Nothing in this section is legal advice, and questions that need it are named rather than answered.

Elsewhere in the record: EU, Duties, Generators, Statements, Pairs, Fields, Terms, Learn, Data. How an instrument is read is set out on the sourcing page.